


Bleeding Flowers

by pretty_mr_sanders (shipit)



Category: Sanders Sides, Thomas Sanders, Video Blogging RPF
Genre: (Almost death), Angst, Blood, Death, Flower Gore, M/M, Sadness, Soft Gore, Unrequited Love, hanahaki
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-15
Updated: 2017-07-15
Packaged: 2018-12-02 14:41:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11511507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shipit/pseuds/pretty_mr_sanders
Summary: Unrequited love is painful.





	Bleeding Flowers

**Author's Note:**

> This is Hanahaki: _The Hanahaki Disease is an illness born from one-sided love, where the patient throws up and coughs of flower petals when they suffer from one-sided love. The infection can be removed through surgery, but the feelings disappear along with the petals._
> 
> (I took a couple artistic liberties x

It’s just a petal. One small, pink, delicate petal drifting from between his lips after ten minutes of painful coughing. Patton stares at it, seemingly innocent on his pillow as if it doesn’t signify the coming of a painful death. He hoped and prayed that his affections would never come to this, but here he is. Glancing around his empty room, as though someone might be watching, he sits up and holds onto the petal. The edge of it is stained dark red. It could be just the design of the flowers, but he knows it’s blood from the vines curling in his lungs, making his chest ache and his throat raw from coughing.

By his bed, he has a plastic water jug, the kind they have in break rooms of corporate offices. The bottle is filled about halfway with flowers and their ragged petals, stained and collected out of a masochistic desire to see how many he can accumulate before they completely kill him with their strangling hold on his lungs It hurts more than usual today, so he knows he doesn’t have long, especially when another fit of coughing brings him two full flowers and a rain of beautiful petals. They get dropped into the jar too, gently floating to join the others. Patton stares at them for way longer than he should before actually getting up, putting on his usual clothes, and going out to the commons to make the others breakfast like he does every morning.

The other three are already awake, or at least, semi-awake. Logan and Anxiety are curled together on the couch, reading  _ Fahrenheit 451 _ and  _ Impulse _ respectively. Beside them both, Roman drinks starbucks while scrolling through instagram. The only one to look up and say good morning is Anxiety, and he does it with a gorgeous smile that makes Patton’s heart flutter. Anxiety’s going to be the death of him. Literally. No amount of pining will take Anxiety’s attention away from Logan and their saccharine love that tastes bitter in Pat’s mouth when he thinks about their constant kisses. Anxiety deserves to be happy, and Logan makes him so. That alone is enough to stop Patton from telling anyone about the flowers slowly taking his life.

“Pancakes?” He asks, opening cabinets.

Roman and Logan make sounds of agreement, but Anxiety properly responds with a “Sounds great, thanks!” 

He’s the only one who thanks Patton for breakfast every morning and dinner every night. It’s just because he understands what it feels like to be useless, unappreciated, hated, and wants to keep anyone from ever feeling any of it again. Anxiety is sweet and thoughtful like that. Thinking about it makes Patton double over in another coughing fit, this one producing a single flower and a few drops of blood that he quickly wipes away. Hoping that it’s done for the time being, he hurries through making breakfast so he can eat something to rid his mouth of the coppery taste. The pancakes are rushed, not as fluffy as usual, and a disgrace, honestly, but Patton hardly even notices.

“Thanks,” Anxiety says again when Patton serves them all a stack of pancakes with all the trimmings each person likes.  Logan eats his with peanut butter, Prince likes fruit and whipped cream, and Anxiety prefers normal butter and syrup. “You okay?” He asks when Patton can barely stomach more than a couple bites.

Before Patton can answer, he has to sprint to the kitchen and throws up in the sink. It’s all blood and flowers. Anxiety runs after him to see if he’s okay, then sees the mess. Too afraid of what he’ll say, Patton turns on the water and begins washing it all down the drain just as he coughs up a few more petals. He knew the disease would claim him quickly, but not this frighteningly so. Until Anxiety reaches up to wipe away his tears, he doesn’t realize he’s crying. 

The contact makes it worse.

He flinches back and coughs up more flowers, the petals darker and clumpy with more blood. “I’m sorry,” he manages to say, then grabs the garbage can to throw up into that again. It burns like when he’s sick, but it’s just flowers and blood that fill the air with a nauseating combination between fragrant cherry blossom and copper. “I’ll clean up the mess, go back to the others.”

“What’s happening, Pat?”

“I…” How can he explain to Anxiety that he’s dying?

“Do you want me to go get Logan?”

Patton shakes his head. “No, I don’t want the other two to see me like this.” 

“Do you want a hug?”

It’ll make things worse, but Pat can’t help himself. He draws Anxiety into a hug and holds him tightly. Holding in more coughing is difficult, but he does it because he might as well take what he can get before he takes his final breath. Eventually he’s forced to step back and away from the hug to cough a rain of flowers that fall to the floor around him. Patton gives Anxiety a reassuring smile that doesn’t reach his eyes and darts back to his room. 

The lights are overall more dim, but brighter on his bed. There are more flowers, pink carnations, arranged on top of his comforter like some sort of sick joke. His bloody cherry blossoms, a few of which are mixed in with the carnations, are a symbol of life’s beauty and fragility, and pink carnations mean remembrance of the deceased. In the center of the mess is a single red rose. True love. If it wasn’t a mark of his own death, Patton would probably laugh at the irony. He falls onto it all before he means too because his lungs are rejecting more and more and more flowers. By some miracle, he doesn’t lay on the rose.

On his back, staring at the ceiling, Patton finally relaxes in bed. On a whim, he picks up the rose and holds it over his chest. “Like Snow White,” he says, despite knowing there will be no true love’s kiss to wake him up.

He barely has the energy to turn his head to the side and throw up again, this time more blood than flowers. Each inhale is a struggle, attesting to the small amount of time he has left. Patton swears he can feel vines curling around his lungs and heart. More coughs rattle him, but no flowers come out. Instead, it feels like something is growing in his windpipe and blocking off his air. His head falls back pathetically on his pillow, and something disgusting tasting fills his mouth, followed by a vine that forces his lips apart. From his mouth bloom an ungodly amount of beautiful flowers. Blood is dripping down the sides of his face from it.

As he chokes, some push their way out through his chest, reaching up towards the ceiling. The blood on his face is joined by tears. Everything hurts so, so badly and he can’t breathe. He’s suffocating, but he can’t pass out, can’t die. Morality is a part of Thomas, and as long as Thomas is awake and alive, he has to be as well. That’s the worst part, because now Patton has to live in constant suffocation, unable to speak or really live.

A blood curdling scream cuts through the air. Patton tries to sit up, but can’t move. Someone comes to his bedside and grabs his cheeks to peer into his eyes. It’s Anxiety, and he looks terrified. “Logan! Princey!” He shrieks, starting to cry. “Oh god, oh god, oh god,” he mumbles in an endless stream, unable to tear his eyes away from Patton.

“What’s going on?” Logan asks as he skids in the room, Roman right behind him. They stop cold when they see Patton.

“He- is he-”

Roman steps forward and nudges Anxiety out of the way to better examine Patton. “He’s alive. Not breathing, but he has a faint pulse and he’s actively crying, so he’s alive.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

His words are muffled and hard for Patton to hear because he has his face pressed into Logan’s chest. The both of them are clinging to each other while Roman properly examines the flowers blooming from Patton’s mouth and above his heart. A gentle tug on the ones coming from his mouth elicit the only sound that he can even kind of make: a pained groan. Roman jumps back, letting go of the flowers. A shower of petals falls onto Patton’s face, a few making it to the blood stained duvet. 

“Logan, find out what this is. Thomas can’t survive without Morality.” It’s obvious that Logan doesn’t like taking orders, but he agrees. “Do you think it’s safe to move him? We shouldn’t leave him alone but I don’t want to work in here. Everything’s sticky and untidy.”

“If the plants are contained in his body, I don’t see why not.”

Anxiety breaks from Logan’s hold to walk over to Patton again. “Be careful,” he says softly. Without thinking, he brushes his fingers along one of the flowers and its vine wraps around his wrist. Before he can scream, Roman slices it off the main plant and helps Anxiety free himself from it. 

“Don’t touch him, Anxiety,” Logan commands, and pulls Anxiety away from Patton and back out of the room.

They’re gone now, leaving just Roman. He apologizes for any pain Patton might feel, then lifts him up to carry him bridal style to the commons. Logan already has several dusty books spread out around him, skimming through all of them at once. Still crying and clinging to one of Logan’s hands with both of his, Anxiety reads along too. Roman offers to ask Thomas, which Anxiety and Logan encourage, and then he sinks out. With him now gone, Anxiety lets go of Logan to come sit on the couch next to Patton.

“Does it hurt?” Patton can’t answer. “Blink once for no, twice for yes.”

Two obvious blinks because he can’t bring himself to lie to Anxiety, not when he’s so clearly shaken and upset. As though he’s mesmerized, Anxiety reaches for the flowers in his chest again and grabs them, not really reacting when they cling to him, and pulls. They slide out with ease, glossy and dark red and it hurts so bad for them to be pulled out but once they’re gone he feels so much better. Fascinated, Anxiety watches the flowers wind around his whole forearm like a snake. He looks back up at Patton, then down to the bloody flowers staining his pale skin again.

“Anxiety!” Logan runs over and drags Anxiety away from Patton. “I said don’t touch. God, what if they do that to you? What am I supposed to do if that happens?”

“I’m okay,” Anxiety protests, and easily lifts the flowers off to hold them at arm’s length, squirming and trying to crawl back up his body. 

The first thing Logan wants to do is rip them away from Anxiety, but he doesn’t know what they’ll do in response, so he has to just watch. “How did you do that? When Roman pulled on them, it hurt Patton more.”

“Don’t know. When he gets back, I’ll have Roman kill this and then I’ll get the other ones.”

“I’m back.”

Roman stands in the middle of the commons with a stack of papers. Logan snatches them immediately to read them aloud. “Hanahaki, or the ‘Dying Flower’ disease, affects those with unrequited love. Flowers grow in their lungs, heart, and stomach. As the disease progresses, it causes intense pain and the sufferer will eject flowers and usually blood through coughing or throwing up. Contact with their unrequited love is painful and worsens the effects. The disease is in its final stage when the flowers burst through their heart and stomach, usually breaking ribs and escaping the chest cavity. At this time, the flowers also grow up the windpipe and out the mouth, blocking air flow.. Combined, these effects lead to an immediate, but painful death.”

“He didn’t die,” Roman interjects.

“Because he can’t, as one of the facets of Thomas’ personality. But he’s probably in a lot of pain at the moment.”

“He is, he told me,” Anxiety says, still holding the flowers away from him. “How do we fix him?”

“According to this article, it is possible to save the victim two ways, but only before it reaches the stage Patton is at. The flowers can be surgically removed, but it also destroys any affection, even platonic, that the victim has for their unrequited love. They can also be cured by their unrequited love falling for them. But once the flowers colonize the heart, about ten hours before killing the victim, there is no hope.”

“But- but I-”

“Roman, please take the flowers from him and shred them,” Logan says, watching Roman take the cherry blossoms from Anxiety’s hands and destroy them. They slip to the ground and sink through the floor, leaving nothing behind. “I believe our only course of action is to have Anxiety remove the flowers in Morality’s throat like he did his chest. Can you do that?”

There’s no need for Anxiety to properly respond.

He crawls back onto the couch and braces one hand on Patton’s shoulder, the other curling around the flowers and wincing at all the sticky, coppery blood that he knows he’ll never forget the feeling of seeping between his fingers. Gently as he can manages, Anxiety pulls them out and hands them to Roman to be disposed of. Once they’re gone, Anxiety backs away to watch.

Patton starts coughing immediately, and out comes a bunch of petals and more blood, but then he properly breathes in, filling his lungs with oxygen. He tries to talk, to tell them that he can feel the flowers are still there, but nothing comes out. They’re filling his voice box, stealing his ability to speak. It hurts to try. Anxiety understands that he can’t and grabs a notepad and a pen for him. With shaking hands, Patton manages to scratchily write,  _ They’re not gone _ . On instinct, Anxiety reaches to comfort him, but the moment they touch, Patton flinches back violently.

Now Anxiety knows.

“Pat…” he breathes, his eyes heavy with guilt and sadness.

In Patton’s line of sight, Logan and Roman exchange weighted looks. “Anx, let’s allow him some sleep for now, okay? He’ll still be here in the morning.” Logan leads him away to their room, but Anxiety is looking back over his shoulder at Patton.

“I understand your pain,” Roman says, coming to sit beside Patton on the couch. “I had mine cut out of me before they got as far as yours did. I didn’t want to find out what would happen if I let them get bad and Anxiety noticed.”

On his notepad, Patton scribbles,  _ Do you regret it _ ?

“Every day.”

**Author's Note:**

> My tumblr is coincidentally also pretty-mr-sanders


End file.
